


Seek a Newer World

by indigostohelit



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, London, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-13
Updated: 2012-11-13
Packaged: 2017-11-18 14:08:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/561893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a bright cold day in London, and the sun is blazing through the frozen atmosphere. It's a bright cold day in London, and the city is steel and stone and brick, sunset-deep and dusky. It's a bright cold day in London, and the pigeons dip and soar and turn through the same patch of sky, again and again.</p><p>A story about stories. Contains spoilers for the movie, as well as canonical character deaths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seek a Newer World

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.  
Teach a man to murder people who teach him things,  
and you’re fucked.

-A Softer World, 884

 

It’s a bright cold day in London, and the sun is blazing through the frozen atmosphere. On the streets below the river winds its way through the empty air; above, the sky is shining like ice, gleaming and unreachable.

It’s a bright cold day in London, and the flags flutter and flap above the buildings; the city is steel and stone and brick, sunset deep and dusky. The people move through the streets like breath in lungs, like blood in an artery, like life in a body.

It’s a bright cold day in London, and the pigeons dip and soar and turn through the same patch of sky, again and again. Their backs are dark and their underbellies are covered with pale feathers, and they dive and whirl, dive and whirl: black, white, black, white.

This is how it goes: blue, red, white. Don’t forget.

 

He’s heard all the stories, but they’ve never meant much; listening to stories gets boring once you’ve given yourself the power to create them. He wonders, sometimes, though, if he closed his eyes it would all still be there: a network of paths and currents and solutions, all laid out in his head, and all he would need to say would be—

Well. He’s not that sentimental. He’s too young, still.

They say: he must have been sent to jail for cyberterrorism when he was just a teenager, he must have broken into the highest databases before he could read, he must have spoken code before speaking English, he must have bled wires and spit silicon when he was born, and he pushes up his glasses with one finger, lets them talk. They say, he’s got wrists like birds, looks like he was cobbled together out of pipe cleaners, lives on nothing but tea, never sees the sun, and he plunges his arms elbow deep into a box of machinery, turns his head aside.

They say he’s got to be a virgin, and he rigs their personal emails to send each other nothing but porn. Just because the story fits doesn’t mean he isn’t allowed to write a new one. (Just because the story fits doesn’t mean it’s true.)

 

She buttons her coat carefully: one after the other, top to bottom, everything in its place. Some things are important.

It is not her job to care about everyone, but she does it anyway. It is her job to know everything, and she does that, too, with as much diligence and attention as she can manage. She becomes aware of every detail: the curve of the wind, the flight of the pigeons, the folds on the flags draped over the coffins. She splays her hands flat on her desk, stares straight ahead, allows herself to imagine for the briefest of moments that she can feel a pulse through the wood.

She has been called _mother_ before. After a certain point, it becomes inevitable. Only a fool would think to ask her the truth of it; as a matter of policy, of course, she is surrounded by fools. She never gives a response. For reasons too obvious and complex to explain, she is not permitted to say _yes_.

 

He sometimes tells women he was born knowing how to shoot a gun, because he knows they won’t believe him. His skin is littered with scars and he makes sure his eyes are always cold; it’s part of the trade. He kisses like a punch to the face and drinks like a punch to the chest, shoots his way through half the continent and fucks his way through the other half, smiles and kills and kisses and dies without thinking for more than a minute about it.

He used to listen to stories; that was a long time ago. Now his mind has no room for stories any more, and his smiles have no room for kindness, and his hands have no room for anything but weapons, gleaming and violent, hard and bright, and he does not bother to create his own stories, just lives off the tail ends of those he has already destroyed. He smiles like a knife; he kisses like a threat. He dies without pain, and returns to life to find that pain has not left him.

He becomes a legend, and likes it. He becomes a weapon, and chooses not to know it. He becomes a resurrection, and re-destroys himself.

He loses the last of his mind along with his teeth.

This is how it goes: blue, red, black. Try to keep up, won’t you?

 

There’s a truth, and it’s not one he prefers to admit: she finds him when he’s seventeen at Oxford, hung-over and bleary-eyed, and has him arrested. She tells his family, later, that he’s died in prison. She hears there’s a funeral. She hears no one comes.

There are men in suits, first, and they give the boy a laptop, ask him to show what he can do. He blows up his own cell door in the middle of the night; they take away the laptop. No one ever asks him why he didn’t just unlock the door and leave. No one ever asks him, but she pins him with a stare when she sees him next, and he looks at once paralysed and terrified and happier than he has ever been.

The others had given him a laptop. She gives him the London Underground, tells him to prove to her that she shouldn’t lock him up again. He asks for his own flat; when she tells him not yet, he asks for permission to move freely throughout headquarters and a cup of Earl Grey, please. She’s so charmed that it isn’t until an hour later she realizes she’s fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.

He can’t shoot a gun. He can’t take a punch. He can’t even set foot on a plane without going a sickly shade of green, and he can think faster than anyone else she’s ever known. She finds, later, that he went to Oxford to study Art History, and refuses to let herself be surprised.

After a while, she stops seeing him regularly; it’s enough to know that he’s there, two floors below her, his mind at work in every part of her organisation.

She does go down to his offices, once, before they’re destroyed. He’s the only one left; it’s three in the morning. He’s asleep in his chair, his head dropped to his chest, his long fingers slack on his keyboard.

She slides his glasses off his face, folds them, and sets them on his desk. _Good work_ , she writes on a scrap of paper, and sticks it to the monitor for him to find when he wakes. She still hasn’t given him his own flat. He still hasn’t done anything with the London Underground. It seems fair.

 

The field agent kisses like he’s trying to hurt someone; he’s not sure if he ever learnt how to do it any other way. His hands are calloused and still shaking, and his stubble scrapes like sandpaper: too rough, just right.

He sinks to his knees. The field agent makes a noise in the back of his throat, low and pained and wanting, harsher than anything he’s ever heard before, and curls those fingers around the back of his neck. He closes his eyes, unzips pants, and sucks.

Afterwards, when the field agent’s leaning out the window without a shirt on smoking a cigarette and he’s still sprawled naked across someone else’s bed sheets, he thinks to go searching for the field agent’s computer. It’s ancient and nearly unused, but he coaxes out of it a few simple tasks involving the field agent’s smoke alarm and burglar alarm, precautions to determine who can enter and who can leave.

He’s buried in his work when an arm slides around his waist and there’s stubble scraping against the shell of his ear, a deep voice asking him what exactly he thinks he’s doing. He does his best not to arch into the field agent’s touch, explains.

The field agent is silent for a while; then he asks if he would like anyone to be shot on his behalf, or anything to be burnt down. The answer is a firm no, and the field agent looks lost; he steals the computer and takes it back to headquarters with him, almost out of pity.

He does not return the computer; he returns to the field agent’s bed, his legs spread, his back arched. There is force there, more vibrant and more potent than anything he has ever seen; it frightens him. Everything frightens him. There is a reason he took this job, after all.

 

After some time, it becomes not about her so much as Her, not about what happened to him so much as what happened to everything. He is a changed man, yes, but there is more than that: it is a changed world.

Before he died, he understood the rules of the game: there would be a gun, and a girl, and he would save the one and fire the other. After he dies, he is surprised to learn that the rules have not changed at all; he is simply on the other side of them. He chalks it up to another lie she chose to hide from him, and does not begrudge her for it. He hardly begrudges her anything, these days. Some time ago he heard that the opposite of hatred was not love, but indifference, and understood.

There are guns, and girls, and he moves through them without method or meaning until a hot day years later. It is like looking into the eyes of a memory. He searches deep in the rusted bank of emotion, finds delight, finds warmth; he saves the gun and fires the girl, makes the offer he knows will be refused, runs his fingers across the chest of a living, breathing connection with the only real thing in the world.

Her eyes are ice. He lets himself spiral toward his final death, leaves a trail of destruction in his wake, as she taught him so many years ago; the last thing he thinks, almost startled, is that he seems to have forgotten how to do it any other way.

 

It’s a stormy dark day in London, and the rain is running down the streets to the river, and from the river on to the sea. It’s a stormy dark day in London, and the gutters are clogged with leaves the colour of fire and blood and brick and rust. It’s a stormy dark day in London, and he huffs a breath onto the windowpane, traces his number into the fog he leaves behind.

Below him, headlights pulse in the mist. His fingers itch for a gun; he smooths his hand on his pants. There are addictions he will never be able to shake, and then there are addictions she would never want him to.

When he closes his eyes, he can sometimes feel the stories surrounding him, layer on layer, in every move he makes. He doesn’t think he was ever meant to; it is a weight that takes his breath away, seeps into his bones like exhaustion and old age, makes him feel as if he is swimming through still water. No wonder the other man went mad.

He opens his eyes. The fog on the window has cleared; he is looking straight into the eyes of his own reflection.

He turns and walks away. He owes her that much.

 

It’s a dark stormy day in London, and the cardinal-red leaves stripped from the trees are papering her headstone, obscuring the view of her name. The rain has transformed the graveyard into a muddy soup; no person in their right mind would be out here in this weather.

No one is out here in this weather. She has trained them well enough for that.

There is a flag propped up against her headstone; it’s a miracle it hasn’t been knocked over by the rain. Someone has settled it in the earth with diligence and attention to detail, and perhaps a certain amount of care. None of these things are part of the job. All of them are necessary.

The leaves fly through the rain, plaster themselves to car windshields and cameras, to windows and telephone poles and skyscrapers and city blocks. They leave her body behind; they dance in the chaos of the London storm; they chase taillights down dark streets; they refuse to do anything but endure.

When they blow off her headstone, it does not reveal her name. The flag stays upright in the liquid ground, because the body remains.

 

It’s a dark stormy day in London, and his fingers hover for the briefest of seconds over the keyboard before flying onward. His eyes are wide and concentrated behind his glasses, and his tongue is trapped between his teeth. There’s still work to be done.

The building hums around him, alive and electric and brilliant. He types on, faster, more urgent, until he’s reached the mainframe of the organisation’s network; it glows gently blue on his screen, the centre of it all, the heart where everything begins.

He spreads his fingers out on his keyboard and fancies for a moment that his consciousness can speed through the wires as fast as electricity, as fast as thought, and in that moment he sees it all laid out before him: the winding paths and currents of his creation, the future in front of him as clear as water, and he presses up his glasses along the bridge of his nose, lets his mind go still for the first time he can remember, and whispers—

“Let there be light.”

And from every part of the building around him, from the computer screens and the fluorescent light bulbs above and the lockers where they keep the guns and the stories where they keep the girls, from the mirrors and the graveyards and the bed sheets and the murders and the lives, light pours, light upon light, light without shadow, light without end; and he sees, and he finds it good.

 

This is how it goes: white, red, blue. This is how it ends: breath, leaves, light, onward and outward through the city, expanding and multiplying a hundred times over and over again, almost like something real.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Seek a Newer World](https://archiveofourown.org/works/631167) by [greedy_dancer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greedy_dancer/pseuds/greedy_dancer)




End file.
